A conjured Einstein
godsend to atheist

Near the end of Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen’s haunting graphic novel “Genius,” the main character, a physicist named Ted, has an epiphany of a kind.

Ted was once a prodigy, a kid so smart he almost couldn’t be taught, recruited at 22 to be part of the research team at the prestigious Pasadena Technical Institute. And then? Crickets, a decade or more of journeyman work, a realignment of his priorities.

Ted has two kids and a wife who may be dying; his father-in-law, who lives with them, treats him with a mix of disdain and outright hate. Do we need to say that he feels trapped, that the pressures of a family in disarray and a job he no longer wants have become too much for him?

Still, Ted has one saving grace, which is his love for Einstein, who holds a place in his life akin to God. “I mean, I’m an atheist — “ Ted explains, “most thinking people are — but Einstein is the pinnacle of a thinking man.”

As “Genius” progresses, this relationship becomes increasingly prominent, until Einstein himself is animated in these pages, discussing the nature of the universe, the nature of discovery, and the essential notion that our lives are always in constant evolution, just waiting for that one idea, that one revelation, for everything to “start anew.”

Einstein is a ghost, a cipher, which is only fitting, since it is Ted who has re-dreamed him into being. “A brain is a brain after all,” he says. “It’s what you do with it that matters.”

Throughout “Genius,” Seagle and Kristiansen play with this, overlapping layers of narrative in the visuals. Past and present blend together, inner and outer lives, while the present is illustrated in a flat, gray wash, its edges muted, as if to highlight the fact that we don’t know where it will go.

This brings us back to that epiphany, which is as earned as it is unexpected -—although I don’t want to give it away.

The same might be said of the entire book, which becomes a paean to the examined life, the life of the mind and the power of convictions: in other words, to not accepting anybody’s version of reality but your own.